The effeminacy of our civilized life, with the employment of
machinery for the hard work, necessitates a resort to artificial
physical exercise.
Every home, especially where there are children, should have a room
devoted altogether, or, on occasions, to gymnastic exercises.
Happily, Schreber, the most eminent of the German school of physical
training, has devised a complete apparatus for family use, to which
he has given the name of "Pangymnastikon," (which may be translated
as meaning all exercises upon one piece of apparatus).
This piece of apparatus weighs not more than ten pounds, may be put
into a small box, can be hung up in any room or hall, a parlor, for
example, in a minute, and offers complete facilities for a greater
variety of fascinating and effective physical exercises than can be
found in a gymnastic hall a hundred feet long, fifty feet wide, and
filled with the ordinary gymnastic apparatus.
When no longer needed, it may be taken down and put away in a
moment.
This piece of apparatus is pretty, inexpensive, and perfectly safe.
The manufacturers furnish with it six little wall maps, on which are
represented, in engravings, one hundred different exercises,
arranged in six groups, and adapted to the varying strength and
capacity of the pupils. A very considerable number of the best of
these can be performed by girls and women in their ordinary long
skirts.
But if I had daughters in my own family, and we were using the
Pangymnastikon, I should urge them to drop their long skirts at the
hour of exercise, and wear a pair of loose pants and a jacket. Such
a dress would permit many profitable exercises for the legs and
hips, which women greatly need.
They seem now, except, perhaps, in the case of dancing girls, to be
almost as helpless, in any extraordinary circumstances, as our
wooden-legged soldiers.
For example, if a woman undertakes to step upon a street car when it
is motion, she is sure to lose her balance; and if she steps off the
car when it is in motion, though the horses are only walking, down
she goes. An hour's exercise each day with the Pangymnastikon would
soon cure her of this awkward helplessness, and, at the same time,
would develop the muscles about the lower part of her body, and thus
save her numberless weaknesses and sufferings.